Visual Studio 2015 launches, with Android, iOS, and even Apple Watch support .NET 4.6 is also out now.

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 will include enhancements that allow Android developers to test their apps in less time.

In another nod to the winners of the mobile market share battle — Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS — Microsoft is improving its signature Visual Studio IDE with more functionality for ...

New research from Strategy Analytics compared the mobile developer environments from Apple, Google and Microsoft, finding that Android Studio ranks far behind the Xcode and Visual Studio IDEs.

Microsoft said support for the Android emulator will be coming soon, but didn't give an exact timeframe. Mac users can sign-up to be notified when it's available from the Visual Studio website.

Support for Android will be a part of Visual Studio 2015, available now as a Preview release (download link). The toolchain supports the Clang compiler and LLVM optimizations.

Total scores were: Xcode - 22; Visual Studio - 21; and Android Studio - 13. "Apple's Xcode beats Android on all measures on which it was evaluated," Strategy Analytics said in a news release.

Android developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio now have more choice. They can opt for Microsoft’s cross-platform toolset or use an Android development add-on recently released as open source.

A skunkworks project by Xamarin, the developers of Mono for Android and Mono Touch, machine-translated millions of lines of Java in Android to C#.

The Visual Studio Emulator for Android is a tool within the full Visual Studio 2015 suite, which Microsoft brought to Mac users for the first time back in April.

While the fresh new Visual Studio 2015 isn't as cross-platform as that, it does include support for other platforms in the mobile category, namely Android and iOS.